


The Ghostly Encounter

by hyunnieandtea



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Dark Past, Family Drama, M/M, Magical Realism, Memory Loss, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 04:57:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21155987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyunnieandtea/pseuds/hyunnieandtea
Summary: Baekhyun, a sorcerer who went to live in the woods after a difficult past, finds himself in a ghostly encounter.





	The Ghostly Encounter

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Another (short and unsurprisingly finished late) fic completed! This is L233. I wanted to try to make this concise with a little twist. Hope you catch some little clue I planted. To the mods, thank you for your endless guidance and commitment to keep these awesome community and personal growth events going, to the prompter, thank you for the lovely prompt (I hope you don't mind and enjoy the twist as much as I enjoyed coming up with the concept), and to the readers, thank you for giving me the chance to say that I was able to follow one of my dreams to add a little writing magic into others' lives. 'Till next time!

For centuries, people have always wondered: if a tree falls in a forest with no one around, would it still make a sound? Pulled roots, creaking wood, and the rustle of leaves may come to mind. But no one ever thinks of what exactly happened to the tree to make it fall.

The forest itself would pay no mind to an old oak nor a young sapling that rests lifeless on the forest floor. Instead, it would pay attention to a lone soul, a wanderer, making sounds from beyond that of nature. Sounds that were not human, sounds that were otherworldly.

Magic. 

Swirls of light with cascades of glitter sway in the light breeze. Zaps of an unknown electricity and whirlwinds of energy greet the trees. 

One wrong flick of a finger, and a tree would bend from the man’s power. 

That is just how at twilight during one evening a tree made a softly sounded descent, but not after an echo of failed spells and curse overpowered the sound of nature. 

The wandered was looking to practice his luck with arcane magic, which blended and reality with fantasy far beyond the mind of ordinary humans. He was trying to make an illusion. 

When normal spells went wrong, most witches and wizards were left with little to no consequences. For powerful, skillful, or talent full sorcerers, there were larger consequences. Cities burned to ashes, lives were lost; for magic, the larger the risk, the larger the outcome. 

This sorcerer, however, only wanted to create a mirage around his little cabin in the woods just in case any unwanted guests would drop by. 

It was difficult for beginners, but at the level he was at, he was frustrated the spell wasn’t working. 

After the fifth tree to catch fire and third to be uprooted altogether, he was over it. 

“Why isn’t this working?” the young man said. 

He paced back and forth between casting until his hands were slightly singed and his body ached. Even simple spell casting could tire a sorcerer. 

“Pull yourself together, Baekhyun,” he said to himself. He then steadied his breathing one more time. 

As he stood in front of his home, he raised both arms to shoulder height, palms down. With a swift motion, he smacked his sooty fingers together and then slowly pulled them apart. Between his hands, a ball of light hovered. The sorcerer pushed his hands back together, feeling like he was pushing the same side of a magnet together. 

He chanted his spell, “protegas me lumen,” to which the ball then melted between his fingers. It looked as if stardust was dripping from his nails. 

The man then began to dance, swaying his arms up over his head, splashing the dust in the air, then sideways to coat the ground. 

The sun was setting, so Baekhyun’s magic and fireflies coated the forest to create a sparkling atmosphere in front of him. 

Spheres of light converged as Baekhyun swayed towards the front gate of his land. The light from his hands disappeared and he began to worry, stopping his dance. 

“No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

The light, which was supposed to lace into a thin, magical cloth, did the exact opposite. The spheres bounced away into the thicket and Baekhyun saw the final glimmers of light turn to soot in his hand. 

He threw his hands in the air and walked back inside, slamming his front door behind him. The noise made birds in the surrounding area dot the lilac sky with ink. Baekhyun immediately walked out, hands in his hair, looking more disheveled than before.

“Fine,” he said, pulling his sleeves up and exposing his arms to the chilly air. With furrowed brows, the young man returned to the same spot he was standing in before and held out his hands.

“You won that time, magic. Just let me get this over with and let me sleep.”

Before anything, he cleared the fire from the trees as he was sick of the burning wood smell and concentrated on the barrier spell.

A tree went up in flames in seconds and he screamed into the air.

Any animals that were still watching the man left, bugs silencing their own white noise.

“What the hell. What the hell? What absolute hellish joke is this?”

Baekhyun flew back inside, ran into his guest room turned library. He rummaged through his books, throwing one after the other on the ground, flipping through the pages, getting a finger cut in the process, and found a book titled in Latin for potions.

After reading over the instructions, Baekhyun whipped up a little cauldron of a solution to sprinkle around his yard. It wasn’t as strong as the spell he hoped to cast, but it was something and he was tired.

In order for this spell to work, all he had to do was sprinkle the liquid onto plants that would grow vines of their own magic to protect the house. A few simple trees would do the trick to last the night.

After the walk around his tiny wooded property, he stumbled into the cabin. He threw the cauldron in the sink, walked down the hall to his bedroom, and plopped onto the bed with a soft huff.

Another day of spell training passed and a night’s rest without worry is something Baekhyun would take any day.

In the past, when Baekhyun lived with his brother and parents, they resented magic. His father, a professor of physics, lived in the realm of logic, not frills and feather pens, floating objects and invisible ones. His mother was the same but focused on nursing. Always at the hospital, never dwelling on if someone could face a miracle and showing people the facts of what made them ill. His brother, too, was looking to follow in his father’s footsteps by studying to become an astrophysicist.

Baekhyun was the outcast. The loner. The one who was different.

Sure, people acknowledged that others had powers in this day and age, but it wasn’t accepted. Take the Byun family as an example, and magic was absolutely off limits. No one in his family had magic flowing between limbs and sparking a web of new nerves into the brain. No, Baekhyun was the weirdo.

So, he left.

After years of torment and being outcasted, he picked up his things and lived in the woods.

It was moments like these, however, that he clung onto the hope that magic would be accepted. Days of feeling like a failure, both in magic and to his family, made him conflicted. Does he keep pursuing magic at the cost of solitude? Or does he join his family and forget all he knows of magic?

With all the lights turned off, Baekhyun began to drift asleep. His eyelids half covered his obsidian eyes and his hair he had been growing out fell just over his brows. He looked around his cozy bedroom. 

A wall of string lights to illuminate the room in the softest blue hue. A pile of blankets to keep him warm on these chilly nights. A photograph of a past memory he had of a lover whom he casted a spell on himself to remove any heartbreak, although there was still that spark of love remaining.

Then, a knock.

Baekhyun tried to ignore it, chalking it up to be the wind making a tree branch hit his house.

Knock.

Knock, knock, knock.

Baekhyun rolled over, grabbing his pillow and covered his ears. The commotion continued until it was a constant knock over and over.

He let out a groan and rolled over and walked over to the door to analyze the dam tree that was keeping him up.

When he opened up the door, he was greeted by something that he never thought he’d see. A ghost.

“Hey,” Baekhyun said. “Um, can you not? I’m trying to sleep. I don’t know who you are, or what your haunting, or if this was even your property at one point, but you need to cut this shit out.”

The ghost, a pale moonlight of a being, was rubbing his hands together apologetically.

“Please,” he cried, “I’m lost. I was chased by these weird things and now I’m here and confused.”

He continued on for a moment before Baekhyun waved his hand in front of his face, unamused. 

“I know your tricks,” he said, starting to close the door. The ghost stopped it with his hand, stronger than Baekhyun imagined. 

“I said knock it out,” Baekhyun warned. “I already have my own conscious haunting me, I don’t need you on top of that. Leave.”

“I’m good, I swear. I followed this light. Yeah, this weird magic path and it led right to your house. I was walking through the woods to get pictures for my photography class and I—”

Baekhyun was confused. “Your what?”

Normally ghosts lose interest in keeping up with life. They haunt, they float around, they usually don’t do too much. This one, on the other hand, was a whole new kind of ghost. 

“My class,” the semi-see through man said, raising his pitch as more of a question than an answer. 

“Ghosts don’t usually take part in human activities. Don’t you have something to haunt?”

The ghost broke down into sobs. “I’m dead?”

Baekhyun shook his head as the ghost took his tear-filled face into his hands, collapsing. 

“Well, have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?”

The sobs halted. “A mirror?”

Before Baekhyun could stop the young ghost, he bolted into the house, running around frantically.

“Shit,” Baekhyun muttered. “Wait, get out. You can’t come in. Don’t you know anything about ghosts? Or wait, you’re an absolute idiot right? How do you not know your dead? Get out!”

Baekhyun started speaking his thoughts out loud, unable to comprehend the act the ghost just committed. Walking into a house as a stranger is one thing, but as a ghost? From Baekhyun’s knowledge, a ghost is chained to a house when they step foot in one. That’s normally why ghosts are so chaotic as they become part of a house. They go in one, accessing the past, present, and future of the events in the house. 

Then there’s this absolute fool.

Why did he not know he’s dead? 

Then, the ghost glowed bright, and then a deep echo filled the house. 

“Dear god, you’re a complete and utter dumbass,” Baekhyun said. “Do you know what that sound means?”

“What?”

“You’re now chained to this house.”

“Chained?”

“Are you not listening? Chained. If you walk into a house as a new ghost, you’re chained to it. That’s how ghosts get abilities. They suck up all of the house’s magic capabilities.”

The ghost fell to the ground. “But I can’t possibly be dead. I was just at school a couple hours ago. I took a path to get home faster and then ended up here. I’m so confused. This has never happened before. I can usually walk through the forest just fine. What happened?”

More tears welled up in the man’s eyes.

“Wait,” Baekhyun said, thoughts flying through his head. “Let me look at something.”

Baekhyun ran to one of his bookcases in the library, rummaging through the piles stacked on the floor until he found a book titled “Gardens: Gnomes and the Unknowns of Growing Magical Plants.”

He looked up his potion in the index, then it’s associated capabilities when used on camphor trees.

Clearing his voice, he walked back into the main room and read the section aloud. “In camphor forests, this potion will have strange effects on non-magical beings. The trees, due to their ancient nature, will use the magic and can cause occasional fatigue, confusion, and on rare instances, turn humans to ghosts for up to several hours. The longer they stay within the circle, the more their chances of staying a ghost forever increase.”

“Thank god I’m not actually dead,” the now not actual ghost said.

“Yes!” Baekhyun said, almost jumping like a puppy after getting a treat from learning a new trick. 

The other man whispered something under his breath, and then leapt up. His white hair flew back, revealing most of his face. A dimple, large lightly colored mahogany eyes, and a smile that was infectious like a virus. A happy virus.

The young man ran to hug Baekhyun, but fell through. Baekhyun’s arms wrapped around himself, coughing afterwards. 

“Sorry, dude,” Baekhyun said, laughing just a bit after seeing the other man smile. 

But those smiles melted down into more sobs. First a tear, making Baekhyun think he was laughing so hard. Then a frown, making Baekhyun’s brain flicker to a ghostly encounter that he had before. He remembered another ghost. Or was it a human? Maybe another sorcerer? 

Baekhyun’s brain was fuzzy. 

“You don’t remember do you?”

Baekhyun looked to the man, unsure. He could only muster a blank stare after hours of magical exhaustion and physical fatigue.

“No, I don’t.”

The ghost began to walk towards the door. “Day one thousand and sixty. Four years to the day. I’ll see you again next year.”

Then the other man walked out the door, holding what looked to be a wand in his hand. “I’ll make you remember what this cruel world did to you. To us. I’ll make sure you find that glimmer of the past I help spark in you. I’ll do it until the day I die, Baekhyun.”

“You— you know my name? You know me? Wait, tell me who you are!”

“Chanyeol.”

With a wave of his wand and a whisper of good-bye, the man left. As soon as he was out of his field of vision, Baekhyun fell to the ground, dreaming of eating delicious food. 

Baekhyun’s memories were wiped; the man disappeared from his mind when that spell was cast.

It then gave Baekhyun another year to get stronger, to work on his magic. It gave him another time at learning all the magic he could for a reason he could not pinpoint. Like a scratch on his brain, like the feeling he had whenever he glazed over the old photograph he had in his room before he went to sleep.

Another year to relive the ghostly encounter yet again.


End file.
